


Sticks and Stones and the Shape of our Bones

by Andfromtherewego



Series: The Art of Drawing Stick Figures [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alpha John, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Basically the Lestrade is the unofficial godfather of the johnlock kid fic, Beta Greg, M/M, Mpreg, Omega Sherlock, Parentlock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-27
Updated: 2015-12-27
Packaged: 2018-05-09 18:02:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5550086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Andfromtherewego/pseuds/Andfromtherewego
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“The case,” the stranger continued, turning impatient, his expression reminding Greg of all the terror teachers he’d had when he was still in school. “I’ll help you solve that case, Inspector, if you drive me to the hospital because it is freezing outside and I live on the other side of London and there is no way that I am going to deliver my child in a street full of Christmas shoppers.”</p><p>A beat.</p><p>Then.</p><p>“Oh,” Greg said, eyes jumping to the large swell of the stranger’s belly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sticks and Stones and the Shape of our Bones

**Author's Note:**

> Not betaed, not britpicked, english is not my first language. Hope you enjoy!

_The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb._

 

 

_-_

 

 

 

Greg Lestrade met Sherlock Holmes on the nineteenth of December.

 

It was too early for Christmas, but near enough to the holiday that the festive mood in the air was more welcoming than annoying, highlighted by fairy lights and falling snow and the bright red 50% OFF CHRISTMAS SALE signs hanging at every shop window. Greg was seated in his car, which he’d parked two blocks away from Scotland Yard, choosing to finish the case here instead of at home where his wife would only sigh and mutter ‘workaholic’ under her breath before launching in a tirade about their daughter. He had the heater turned up at full blast; a case file was sitting on his lap. He was chewing on the end of a pen, concentrating on the bruises that decorated the neck of forty-two-year-old Maya Solis and he was wondering whether or not her assailant was male—because clearing that would certainly make solving this case three percent easier—when the passenger door flew open.

 

The intruder looked at him with a bored expression. He was young, somewhere around eighteen or twenty-one, with a face that reminded Greg of the stolen pre-Raphaelite paintings he’d helped retrieve from a storehouse three months ago, dressed in an expensive black wool coat that sat too big around his shoulders. He glanced at the open file on Greg’s lap, which Greg wasn’t able to hide because he was still a bit startled by the appearance of this stranger. Anyone would be if they were in his shoes.

 

“I’ll help you solve that,” the stranger said confidently, ignoring Greg’s spluttering questions, “if you drive me to the hospital.”

 

“What—”

 

“The case,” the stranger continued, turning impatient, his expression reminding Greg of all the terror teachers he’d had when he was still in school. “I’ll help you solve that case, Inspector, if you drive me to the hospital because it is freezing outside and I live on the other side of London and there is no way that I am going to deliver my child in a street full of Christmas shoppers.”

 

A beat.

 

Then.

 

“Oh,” Greg said, eyes jumping to the large swell of the stranger’s belly.

 

He drove.

 

-

 

Greg learned the difference when he was thirteen. Sex had stopped becoming a vague, magical thing that only adults understood, and morphed into a fact of life that needed to be taught to blushing pre-pubescents like him.

 

Greg was a beta, from a family that was primarily betas with only one or two alpha cousins that he never got to see anyway so they didn’t really count. Betas, he learned from the pamphlets they handed out in school and hospital visits, made up most of the earth’s population. Betas were boring, biologically-speaking, but Greg preferred the word ‘safe’ because at least he was never plagued by pheromones and breeding instincts, unlike alphas and omegas.

                                                                                     

Alphas made up thirty-seven percent of the population, while omegas made up nineteen percent, with three out of ten omegas being male, and when the war broke out in the forties, the omega population had declined to an alarming six percent, which Greg only knew because of those pamphlets, some of which his own daughter had brought home a few years ago. But that little fact was the one his mind clung onto whenever he saw an omega. Society viewed as them as treasures, sweet-natured and stunningly beautiful and Greg had to admit that while he wasn’t affected by pheromones, he occasionally turned his head whenever one passed by.

 

Attractive he could agree on. But thanks to Sherlock Holmes, the sweet-natured part flew out the window. Hell, it flew to the other side of the world, out the universe even.

 

Sherlock was anything but sweet. No, Sherlock was annoying.

 

“That’s because you’re all idiots,” Sherlock groaned, making Greg grit his teeth. All his concern about labor pains also flew out the window during the drive to the hospital, because omegas were apparently rarely stricken by birth pains—they were nicknamed _breeders_ for a reason. Sherlock looked fine now, like he hadn’t just pushed out a baby a few minutes ago, and the only signs of his labor was that Sherlock was covered in dried sweat and his belly had deflated like a balloon.

 

The baby was a boy by the way.

 

He was a large baby, a mass of wrinkled pink flesh swathed in blue cloth with a hospital-issued knit cap on his head, and Greg supposed that he looked a bit like Sherlock with his cupid bow’s lips and long eyelashes. But Greg had seen his hair before the nurse handed him to Sherlock. Blond hair, soft and feathery light. Sherlock’s hair was a thick mess of dark curls.

 

“So…” Greg cleared his throat, wondering if he had the right to ask because Sherlock _was_ still a stranger, in spite of claiming that Maya Solis’ murderer was her inheritance-greedy nephew and deducing that Greg had a troubled marriage and a troubled teenage child. Then he thought _fuck it_ because Sherlock had slid in his car like he owned it and they were probably past this point anyway because Sherlock was feeding the kid in front of him. Greg didn’t bat an eye at the sight, too used to his own mother doing it to his younger siblings while Greg was growing up, but normal people didn’t do that in front of strangers, right?

 

Sherlock wasn’t normal.

 

“Where’s the father?” Or the grandparents, his mind added, and it dawned on Greg once more that he was the only one here. He kept expecting someone to burst in the room, a relative of Sherlock’s or a friend, their concerns all falling away at the sight of the baby, giving Greg enough time and enough relief that Sherlock wasn’t alone, to quietly slip out the door and let them have their picturesque family moment. But there was no one.

 

“He’s in Afghanistan,” Sherlock replied quickly and Greg blinked, his mind immediately piecing the story together, taking note of Sherlock’s age and the lack of family in the room. Nineteen-years-old only, and at this time and age, it wasn’t common to get pregnant that young, even if you were an omega, because the right to decide what they wanted for their bodies was something omegas had fought for in the 1970’s. There were birth control pills and abortion clinics everywhere and occasionally, there was a news brief about the Pro-Life movement rallying in front of an omega health care center because the world still produced dickheads like that. But bonding at that age wasn’t uncommon since science had developed enough to keep omega uni students from getting pregnant, and well, there were people who found their true love at twenty or something (Greg wasn’t bitter—okay, maybe a bit). The hospital gown Sherlock wore didn’t hide his neck. There was no bite there which, to a beta like Greg, was the only way he could tell when an alpha or an omega was bonded.

 

Greg looked at the baby—at the result of a one-night-stand between a coltish, smart-mouthed, possibly disowned from his posh family uni student and a soldier currently in Afghanistan—and sighed.

 

-

 

He got the story wrong.

 

-

 

The story was this.

 

In January 6, 1991, Sherlock Holmes, on a birthday dare, walked up to a table of deployed soldiers and decided to flirt with a red-haired man his friend had pointed out to him. But when he got there, his eyes met those of short, blond-haired, blue-eyed John Watson. Sherlock’s brain, liking what it saw, immediately changed target, although his flirting came out a lot less suave and a lot less impressive than he’d planned.

 

John Watson was six years older than Sherlock and six inches shorter and when Sherlock Holmes stood in front of him, stuttering and trying to be lascivious, the alpha part of his brain nodded and said ‘this is the one John’.

 

John left the bar with Sherlock, to the jeering and catcalls of his and John’s friends which turned Sherlock’s ears an interesting shade of red. What was supposed to be a one-night stand turned into dates which turned into nights at Sherlock’s flat, and while John was breaking all his don’t-get-attached-to-anyone-while-you’re-still-serving rule, he couldn’t let go of Sherlock because he was sweet and snarky and highly intelligent and his secretive little smiles at John were enough to make his knees go weak with _want_. By the third week, he already wanted to _bond_ with him.

 

But that wasn’t possible.

 

It was too early and there was Sherlock’s older brother to deal with because Sherlock had just turned eighteen and he’d just gotten out of rehab and there was no way he was going to let his little brother make another huge mistake. Besides, John was a soldier and he willingly went to Afghanistan to get shot at. The risk was too high and John didn’t want to leave Sherlock with a bond bite and a dead mate, so John went back to Afghanistan with the memory of Sherlock’s skin and mouth against his and one more reason to live.

 

Four weeks later, that one reason turned to two.

 

-

 

Sherlock lived in 221B Baker Street. The flat he lived in was a mess and the first time Greg had visited, he’d reeled back upon seeing the rows of pickled brains and eyeballs, sitting in their little jars on the kitchen counter like they were innocent figurines. There was a skull on the mantelpiece and another hanging on the wall, which someone had cheekily put headphones on, as if that would make it less creepy. Sherlock’s landlady, a Mrs Hudson, didn’t complain about the macabre state of her tenant’s flat because the boy was sweet and that son of his was adorable and besides he always paid rent, or rather his older brother did, and she didn’t want to keep going up there to complain about nonsense things, she had a hip, see, and did the nice inspector want some tea or biscuits while he was visiting?

 

It always felt surreal.

 

Sherlock, after proving that he was right with Maya Solis, helped him on the cases he couldn’t solve, which Greg brought in the form of folders and pictures and medical files that Sherlock would spread out on the coffee table, the skull watching their process from the mantelpiece. Greg could see that he was itching to go to an actual crime scene and by pulling a few strings, Greg _could_ make it happen. But Sherlock had a baby that was too young and too vulnerable for the omega in him to leave to strangers, so there was that.

 

The baby was named Arthur.

 

“Arthur?” Greg had asked, startled, because _Sherlock_ was uncommon and Greg, having met Sherlock’s older brother shortly after the hospital, thought that _Mycroft_ was also posh as fuck. They were old money rich, Greg learned. Sherlock had graduated from a boarding school in Switzerland with a trust fund that was taken from him after his brief stint with cocaine, and which he’d gotten back shortly after Arthur was born. His parents had several vineyards in Italy, where they currently resided in a small brick house that Sherlock once said looked like you’d use it as a logo for organic butter. The vineyards were the kind that produced aged wine that was auctioned to aging casino players with too much money and time on their hands; there were several bottles sitting next to the pickled brains. Sherlock, ironically, like his own son, was an accident, a surprise baby that Violet Holmes had when she was already forty-one and thinking of menopause, which explained the large age gap between him and Mycroft. But they didn’t get rid of him because if Mycroft wasn’t going to _inherit_ the vineyards and bee farms and other family businesses, then maybe their Sherlock would.

 

Common names didn’t seem to run in that kind of family.

 

“It wasn’t _my_ idea,” was all Sherlock said in response.

 

Arthur had Sherlock’s pale blue eyes and pale skin and his sire’s blond hair which sprung from his head like a shrub. Greg liked to pat it when he greeted him and Arthur would stare up at him with that blank baby expression, like he was saying _who the hell is this?_

 

There was a playpen in the living room, near the coffee table where he and Sherlock worked. The playpen only housed two things: a sun-yellow quilt with bees on it which Sherlock’s mother had knitted, and a large golden-brown teddy bear in a military uniform which John had brought home with him. And when Arthur was old enough to sit up without wobbling, he would lean against the bear and look at them with an almost contemplative expression, his large blue eyes settling on his mother before letting out an ear-piercing shriek that never failed to make Greg check his ears for blood. “He’s hungry,” Sherlock would explain and he’d rise to get him, pictures of decaying body parts falling from his lap in his hurry.

 

“His appetite is just like John’s,” Sherlock muttered under his breath, the baby in one arm, holding a bottle in his little hands and looking quite triumphant that his banshee cry had worked yet again.

 

Sherlock did that often. He’d say things about John and Greg would collect the information and piece up a new story, one closer to the truth, because Sherlock wasn’t the type to sit down and chat about his family life.

 

John was an alpha from a family of betas who were unfortunately, the close-minded overly-religious kind that believed alphas and omegas were the scum of the earth. His sister, an alpha as well, had run away with her mate when he was fifteen and John hadn’t seen her since, making it quite a lonely childhood. He played rugby like a professional but when it came to choosing a scholarship, John had opted for the military training because it paid better and he’d always thought that the army could use one more doctor. And while Sherlock didn’t say it out loud, it was obvious from the way he brightened whenever he mentioned John’s name that John Watson was the love of his life.

 

They had Skype calls every Thursday and Greg was to avoid the flat at all costs during that day because there were things he probably wouldn’t want to see, which Greg took to mean ‘I Skype naked with my technically not-my-bond-mate-but-we’ll-get-there-someday’. John had held his child only once. He’d arrived, battered and jetlagged two days after Arthur’s birth, because Arthur wasn’t supposed to arrive on the nineteenth but oh well he was a Holmes and they were unpredictable by nature. The army had allowed him a month with his child before they shipped him off again.

 

It wasn’t enough.

 

“It gets harder and harder to concentrate,” John would tell him on the night Greg finally got to meet him. “I’ll be there in my bunk and Sherlock will show me things: Arthur’s first walk or the first time he’s able to finish a whole bottle by himself or that time he puked all over Mycroft’s suit. And he records, everything, yeah? More than any parent in the universe, probably. But it’s not—it’s not the same.”

 

John would smile at him sadly and Greg would recognize it, the wistful expression of a parent with a distant child.

 

“Arthur…he cries when I hold him.”

 

-

 

“I can’t believe him! That bastard, that—that _freak_ ,” Sally Donovan ranted and Greg rose quickly, waving his hands in front of him to get Sally’s attention. It worked. She looked at him, an angry ‘what?’ on her lips, then stopped when her eyes found Arthur who was staring at her with rapt attention.

 

Sally and Sherlock hated each other from the moment they caught sight of each other—or rather, from the moment Sherlock being Sherlock, opened his mouth and commented on the state of Sally’s knees, loudly implying that she and a forensic officer named Anderson were having an affair, something everyone within a ten meter radius took note off because there was finally something to talk about that didn’t have anything to do with dead railroad workers. Greg, after having reread everything that had to do with omega and alpha physiology shortly after a case involving meth-laced omega heat suppressants, thought that it also had to do with the fact that both Sally and Sherlock were the only omegas in the alpha-beta population that made up New Scotland Yard. It was competition, never mind the fact that Sherlock was mad for his baby daddy, or that Sally had a low opinion of the alphas in the workplace (Anderson was a beta with an alpha wife and Greg had no idea how that happened—he didn’t really want to ask). It was instinct. Instinct was weird like that.

 

Sally liked Arthur, though. Sherlock brought him with him whenever Greg was able to make him do the paperwork, and he’d become a bit like a mascot, the officers always making excuses to come up to him and pinch his cheeks or ruffle his hair. Technically, there weren’t any rules about bringing a child to NSY, especially during the slow days when all the criminals seemed to have decided they’d be proper citizens for a few weeks, but his presence still made Greg nervous.

 

Adults liked to swear. Swearing came to them naturally.

 

It was instinct.

 

And Arthur, like most three-year-olds, had a habit of repeating everything he heard.

 

Sally scowled, defeated, and then put her hands on her hips which Arthur mimicked, to Greg’s amusement. “He made Hopkins cry again,” she said and Greg groaned. Typical Sherlock.

 

“I don’t want a suitor,” Sherlock said later on when they were at an Italian restaurant with an owner Sherlock had sort of stopped from getting arrested. There was no candle on the table. There never had been because Angelo apparently knew John. “They had their first date here,” Angelo had said with a proud expression and Sherlock had, to Greg’s fascination, blushed at the memory.

 

Arthur sat beside Sherlock, half his face a mess of pasta sauce. He reached out to take his spoon, his elbow knocking down the small sign that held a picture of the daily special. Greg righted it.

 

“They’re not going to believe you until they have proof that you’re with someone,” he explained and Sherlock rolled his eyes as if to say ‘and this is why you need me to solve your cases’. Sherlock’s neck was still bare and John’s scent on him disappeared a few days after his leaves and because Sherlock didn’t use Facebook, there was no way of telling that he was with John. Well, there was _one_ but the officers, like Greg had three years ago, believed that Arthur was the result of a one-night stand. A mistake.

 

“Not a mistake, never a mistake,” John would say. “Unplanned, yeah, but we don’t regret having him.”

 

Arthur wiped his hand on his empty plate then spread it on the white table cloth, leaving a handprint stain of marinara sauce on it that would make the person assigned to wash those cry. “Mama,” he called and Sherlock looked at him then nodded, as if approving his handiwork. Arthur beamed at him.

 

-

 

Sherlock was a good parent.

 

You wouldn’t think of it when you saw him. Sherlock was all hard lines, brusque and cold and tactless and he showed little interest in children that were not his own, so making the assumption that Sherlock had no maternal instincts was an easy one to make.

 

But it wasn’t the case.

 

Sherlock knew what he was doing and all that talk about omegas naturally being good parents was bollocks because Greg had talked to way too many children of abusive omegas. Greg had one child and when Ashleigh was born Greg and his wife Susie had stumbled through everything, and it was honestly a miracle that Ashleigh had come out alright because Greg had dropped her twice when she was a baby (he didn’t mean it). Rebellious and stubborn, yes, but Ashleigh was seventeen and teenagers were supposed to be rebellious and stubborn, although Greg did miss the little girl who’d clung to him and begged for him to play Mario Kart with her.

 

Sherlock had childproofed the flat himself and even though Greg had thought it a hazard, a close inspection would make you see that there were rubber lids on all the sockets and that all of Sherlock’s strange experiments were out of child’s reach. The fridge had a human head in it, the last time Greg had checked, but on the lower section there were Tupperware containers that held food, categorized by their nutritional value. There were toys in Arthur’s room upstairs, courtesy of Mycroft, and at nine pm, when Greg was still at the flat, Sherlock’s phone alarm would ring and he’d stand up and carry his kid upstairs for bedtime. Sherlock would play the violin until Arthur was asleep, and only then would he return to the case.

 

When there was a case that required Sherlock to spend eighteen or more hours away from Baker Street, Sherlock would leave Arthur to only two people. The first was Mrs Hudson who acted like Arthur’s grandmother because Arthur’s own was too far away and too old to travel comfortably. She’d bake him cookies and tell him all about her time in Florida and her dead husband and Arthur would babble about it to Sherlock when he returned. The second was Molly Hooper, a sweet beta girl who worked in the morgue of Bart’s and who would always hand out body parts to Sherlock for him to experiment on, like she was passing him casseroles and not Mr Smithson’s liver or Mrs Parker’s left hand. Molly lived by herself and had a cat named Toby and when Molly brought Arthur back home, he’d always have cat fur all over the front of his jumper.

 

Arthur, by the way, wasn’t a genius.

 

He was clever for a three-year-old. He knew the alphabet and he could already read and write and because he was an alpha, he explained things by their scent, but aside from those, there was nothing extraordinary about his intellect. Unlike Sherlock and his brother, who Greg learned could already deduce people and play instruments when they were Arthur’s age. His intellect was John’s, Sherlock explained and Greg was surprised because for someone who always claimed that everyone aside from him were idiots, he seemed okay with Arthur.

 

Of course, Sherlock wasn’t the perfect parent because that didn’t exist and Arthur would probably grow up and list murders and crime scenes in his interests, but he was a happy kid and that was what mattered.

 

-

 

And then there were cases that were too much.

 

“Is he alright?” The line was scratchy, more static than sound, but Greg could hear the worry in John’s voice. Greg had let Sherlock give John his number when it became clear that Sherlock helping him solve cases was going to become permanent and while Greg had only seen John’s face once or twice while Arthur was talking to him via Skype, Greg hadn’t even been surprised when his phone rang and John Watson’s name appeared. John trusted him and it warmed Greg a bit, that someone he’d never even personally met could trust him this much.

 

“The doctors say he’ll come to in a few hours,” Greg said which wasn’t a yes. He looked to where Mycroft Holmes sat at his brother’s bedside, head bowed, his knuckles turning white as he gripped the handle of the black umbrella he always carried around. Sherlock’s eyes were closed and his face was so bruised that Greg couldn’t even see his skin color.

 

They’d been trailing a drug ring for months and Sherlock, stupid impatient child that he was, had ran ahead, ignoring Greg’s protests. He was kidnapped and they’d beat him bloody for a few hours and when Greg and his team opened the warehouse, they found him strapped to a chair, half-conscious and bleeding.

 

“Greg—” John said and Greg blinked, startled, because Sherlock called him Lestrade and didn’t even know his first name even though he and Greg had known each other for three years, and here was John, calling him by his first name like they were the best of friends. “Greg,” he said again and Greg could hear him struggling. “Is Arthur—is he there?”

 

“No, he’s with Mrs Hudson.”

 

And no one had explained it to him yet. It would have to be Greg, he knew because Mycroft wasn’t good with Arthur and because Mrs Hudson would only weep too much and Greg had done it before. He’d delivered this kind of news to children, had sat kids down and told them that their mommies and daddies were in a better place. He’d done it for years.

 

It never got easier to be the deliverer of bad news.

 

-

 

A few days later, he met John.

 

-

 

“Do you do it often?” John asked. He looked like he hadn’t slept and there was cut on his chin from where his razor had slipped, but he was smiling. He was still dressed in his army fatigues which were dusty, like he carried a bit of Afghanistan with him. “Deliver bad news?”

 

“Before,” Greg said. “When I was younger.” Now he left it mostly to his subordinates and he watched their faces turn white as they haltingly tried to explain to the victim’s loved ones that it wasn’t their fault, that sometimes these things happened and they were sorry that they weren’t there to stop it.

 

Greg pulled up a chair and sat down, and Arthur immediately slid off the bench to climb into his lap. He didn’t miss the wistful expression on John’s face. It embarrassed him and Greg looked away, wondering if he ought to encourage Arthur to go to his father, but it was clear that Arthur didn’t like John. He tried looking at it at a child’s perspective. Arthur had the visual, the knowledge that John was his father, but the real thing was always unexpected and Arthur had always been shy. He was looking at John with a distrustful expression on his face, like seeing John outside a laptop screen was against the laws of the universe.

 

“He likes you,” John said simply. He had Sherlock’s hand, the one that wasn’t connected to the IV, in his and the intimacy of it startled Greg. It was always different, seeing the real thing.

 

“Yes, well,” Greg coughed and Arthur whipped his head to look at him, eyes narrowing in the way Sherlock’s did when he was thinking of something. “I do act as his godfather.”

 

“Yeah,” John said with a laugh. “I’m sorry about that.”

 

 

-

 

Officially, Arthur’s godparent was Mike Stamford, John’s best friend or rather the only friend of John’s who wasn’t in Afghanistan. But Mike had only played that role for a year before moving to India with his husband and children, so his presence in Arthur’s life came in the form of hand-painted toys and colorful pictures books that came in boxes slightly battered from their flight.

 

Greg didn’t have a godchild of his own. Most of his close friends were too career-oriented to start families and his siblings had all chosen their best friends to be their children’s godparents. So it wasn’t hard to fill in the role that Mike couldn’t play.

 

His wife disagreed. “Fine, go back and play house with your whore,” she’d said and Greg had only raised his eyebrows because that was wrong on so many levels while Ashleigh rolled her eyes behind her mother’s back. He would get a divorce once Ashleigh turned eighteen.

 

See, Greg cared. It was his flaw. He cared a lot about people. He cared when he saw Michael Lane bullying Andy Gardner when they were still in primary school and it didn’t matter that Greg was shorter and smaller than Michael, someone _had_ to stop him. He cared when he walked into the headmaster’s office and saw Ashleigh sitting there, eyes red from crying. He cared about Sally who’d snarl and scowl at the alphas leering at her, as if anger would replace her anxiety. He cared about the people involved in the cases he worked on, even though he'd been told time and time again that he should detach himself from the victims.

 

It made him a workaholic, true, and a lot of his friendships fizzled out because you couldn’t care about everyone, apparently—you had to be selective—and Greg had decided on the night he met Sherlock that he’d be part of that group, that Greg would care about him like he was his own.

 

-

 

“I’m going to ask Sherlock to marry me.”

 

“Aren’t you—”

 

“Yes,” John said before Greg could finish the question. _Aren’t you an alpha and an omega? Is that necessary when you can bond?_ He looked more approachable out of the army fatigues, almost—dare Greg say it— _cuddly_ in an oatmeal jumper and blue jeans, but the detective in Greg could still see the soldier in John. John sat with the wall at his back, facing the hospital canteen and there was a nervous twitch in his left hand that told Greg it was craving the safety of a gun.

 

“But we can. There are no rules that says we can’t and aside from the government benefits, it’s less risky than a bond. See, if we’re bonded and I somehow croak in the dessert, it will hurt Sherlock more than if we were just married.” He waved his hands, trying to articulate how it was different but Greg was a beta and it was like communicating blindfolded in the bottom of a pool. He shrugged and John huffed.

 

“I think Sherlock will be very hurt either way if you die. Doesn’t matter if you’re bonded or just married,” Greg commented because it was the truth anyway. John flushed, his happy smile almost inappropriate considering they were talking about him dying. Ah, Greg thought, no wonder Sherlock was so in love with him.

 

John would be here for three months, thanks to Mycroft’s influence. He would quit the army after finishing the rest of the year because Arthur’s distance to him was becoming a problem and maybe having John in London would lessen the chances of Sherlock getting hurt while running after murderers. Sherlock, when he’d finally woken up, eyes widening at the sight of John standing at his bedside, had been overjoyed by the news and Greg had been unfortunate enough to witness some very intense snogging, the kind he thought people grew out of when they stopped being teenagers. He was still confined however, and wouldn’t be out for another two days, but it didn’t really matter as John visited him every day with Arthur—who still kept a safe distance from John and refused to hold his hand unless they were crossing the street, though he was starting to lose the distrustful look in his face so that was an improvement.

 

“So…I’m asking on Sherlock’s behalf if you’d like to be his best man?”

 

Greg’s mouth actually dropped open in surprise. John laughed then raised a hand as if to say that Greg should shut up for a moment which was completely unnecessary because Greg’s mind was filled to the brim with question marks. He sat up a bit then withdrew a small, crumpled square of white paper from his back pocket.

 

“Look,” John said as he unfolded it and Greg breathed a surprised ‘oh’, his chest flooding with warmth, “Arthur’s already made the decision that you’re part of the family.”

 

It was a drawing. Horrible in the way all children’s drawings were but Greg could still distinguish the stick figures for who they were. A scribble of black crayon for Sherlock’s hair, a lopsided rectangle with a lemon yellow circle that Greg guessed was John’s face in Skype, a giant circle with a black triangle that was undoubtedly Mycroft and his umbrella, a purple stick figure with a squiggly right leg that was Mrs Hudson, a figure with a badly drawn cat that was supposed to be Molly and then him. He was a stick figure with a shock of grey crayon hair and a frowning red mouth and Greg laughed.

 

“Yes,” he said and John Watson grinned at him, his smile already as familiar to Greg as his three-year-old son’s was.

 


End file.
